THE BIG GORILLA runs the Backa Theatre, in Göteborg; Daniel directed "Sunday's Children." But, even though Bergman has reno- vated a few buildings on his Fårö prop- erty as a summer enclave for his chil- dren, it's not easy to get near him. "They have dinner once, maybe, if at all," Ullmann says. "Then they fight to sit at his side. Sometimes he comes by for coffee. They never know when, and it's an honor. Then he has his cinema. He invites some to the cinema in the afternoon, others in the evening." When Ullmann shuts her eyes and thinks of Bergman, she sees, she says, "this man who sits in a chair with this smile-a kind of half smile-and very, very lonely; feeling he is a stranger." She adds, "He is connected to his creativity, but not necessarily to the world." The isolation that defines Bergman is part of what animates the uncanny atmos- phere in his work and activates his un- conscious. He claims that there are two ghosts-a judge and a cobbler-who occupy his Fårö outbuildings, and who appear only at night. "I have heard voices," he says. "Once I saw my mother. I was sitting looking out at the sea. Then sud- denly I felt that somebody was standing behind me. I looked, and she was there. Very beautiful and very young." For more than half a century now, Bergman has traded in the mysteries with the sure knowledge "that there are a lot of realities in our reality." He says, "We don't know anything about those realities. The musicians and the prophets and the saints have given us some messages-have given us intima- tions of the ineffable." Bergman can hear it at the end of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: "The chorus is going higher and higher, and suddenly is silent," he says. "Then you hear four or five bars, and you have a feeling that reality has opened up. Beethoven, who was deaL had heard something that never had been written before." Part of Bergman's gift to his century has been to make vis- ible the mystery he sees around him- to glimpse the eternal in the stage-man- aged transcendence of play: "Anything can happen, anything is possible and likely/' the Grandmother says to Alex- ander, reading fÌom Strindberg's "A Dream Play," in the last beat of "Fanny and Alexander." "Against a faint background of reality, imagination spins and weaves " new patterns. i;ff ( V ,,) , "f W . ; (t J &: f ,! ø -..l - æ !- ( þ m = 'I I %I/ if t / ì (j ....-::;:'.--::- L 79 ø' 1 / t' P-C' ç; IS, 5/1'1...l It e-r' "Have some respect for my learning style. " . "Ingmar got the life he wanted," Er- land Josephson says. "He is the protago- nist of his own life. It's a drama. He's creating that drama all the time. Now we have to discuss how to end the drama-some philosophy for leaving h " J h . '" ì{ T , t e stage. osep son contInues, v ve ve promised if we get senile to say to each other, 'No, that's enough.'" For the mo- ment, it's not. Bergman's strategy seems close to Edmund Wilson's stoic dictum: "Keep going; never stoop; sit tight; / Read something luminous at night." "I'm my own god, I supply my own angels and demons," a Bergman charac- ter says in "The Rite"; Bergman is also his own clown. A few months ago, he walked into the office of one of the Dramaten's dramaturges, Ulla Åberg, and pinned on her bulletin board a color photograph of himself with a clown's red nose. The image is apt. Bergman, like Uncle Carl in "In the Presence of a Clown," is capering with the absurd: defYing death in his art and watching oblivion 100m ever closer in his life. But mortality is the one thing Bergman can't redeem through imagination. "I couldn't manipulate being born," he . says. "When Ingrid came home and told me she had cancer, I knew the whole time that it was hopeless, but Ingrid didn't kno That was the sec- ond time I saw realit)1. It was impossible to manipulate that." Bergman is curious about the third time he'll come up against that intractable realit)1. "1' m an old man. I am close to the great mys- tery," he says. "I am not afraid of it. I am fascinated, not afraid." A few years ago, when Lars Löfgren was still head of the Dramaten, he and Bergman walked past the green- room, a spacious place full of oil paint- ings of the theatre's old luminaries and big pieces of well-upholstered fur- niture, which give it the cozy feel of a gentlemen's club. The greenroom door was open, so Bergman walked in. No- body was there. Löfgren recalls, "'Lis- ten!' Bergman said. I couldn't hear a thing. 'What is it?' I said. Bergman said, 'They're all here.' 'What do you mean?' 'The actors,' Bergman said. 'They're not finished with the theatre.' " Löfgren continues, "He looked around the room and turned to me and very lovingly said, 'One day; we will be with them.' " .